Synchronisation in .NET– Part 1: lock(), Dictionaries and Arrays

As part of our tuning efforts at Livedrive, I ran into a deceptively simple problem that beautifully illustrates some of the scale principles I have been teaching to the SQL Server community for years.

In this series of blog entries, I will use what appears to be a simple .NET class to explore how modern CPU architectures handle high speed synchronisation. In the first part of the series, I set the stage and explore the .NET lock() method of coordinating data.

The Effect of CPU Caches and Memory Access Patterns

In this blog, I will provide you with some “Grade of the Steel” background information that will help you understand CPU caches and their effects better.

As we move towards a future where power consumption in the server room begins to make a big dent in the balance sheet – it becomes important for programmers to fully understand hardware and make the best possible use of it, instead of floating around in the leaky abstractions of the virtual systems. Even when we take the old enemy of I/O out of the equation, there are other bottlenecks we need to worry about: DRAM access time being one of the most important.

Implementing MurmurHash and CRC for SQLCLR

As we saw in my previous post, the build in hash functions of SQL Server were either expensive with good distribution, or cheap, but with poor distribution. As a breath of fresh air, let us look at a useful magic quadrant: